POET MATTHEA HARVEY’S PLANS TO SLOW RISING CURRENTS

MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City's harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

Related Events

Rising Currents Open Studios

This is the first opportunity for the public to visit the Rising Currents architect-in-residence studios at P.S.1. As part of P.S.1’s Saturday Sessions, the five teams will open their studios to the public and be available to discuss their work. Two rounds of presentations will be given. The first round of presentations will begin at 2:15 p.m. and the second will begin at 4:30 p.m.

Organized by The Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with P.S.1, Rising Currents will include a residency for teams of architects and designers at P.S.1 this fall and an exhibition at MoMA next spring. The residency at P.S.1 is part of Free Space, a new project with artists and nonprofit arts institutions in which P.S.1 provides collaborative use of its gallery space for events, rehearsals, and other live presentations.

The Ammann Singstad Lecture on Infrastructure honors the memory of the two great civil engineers who shaped the bridges and tunnels of New York in the middle of the twentieth century—Othmar Ammann (1879–1965) and Ole Singstad (1882–1969)—by inviting the most distinguished civil engineers in the world to speak about their own work and its greater impact. The lectures highlight the aesthetic and social dimensions of large civil and landscape engineering works and their repercussions on the physical, social, and political environment. Norwegian civil engineer Tor Ole Olsen will speak on infrastructure in the marine environment with an emphasis on his work with concrete structures in oil and gas, bridges, and renewable energy sources. This program is sponsored by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General and presented as part of the public programming associated with the upcoming MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. This lecture has been scheduled in conjunction with the Detour exhibition at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

The Promise of an Island: The Plan for Governors Island’s Park and Public Space

In conjunction with the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, presents a lecture titled “The Promise of an Island: The Plan for Governors Island’s Park and Public Space.”

Rising Currents Boat Tour

The Center for Architecture and The Museum of Modern Art invite you to on a guided boat tour of the five sites included in MoMA’s exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. Representatives from the five architects-in-residence teams will give overviews of each site, explaining how the solutions on view in the exhibition present new ways to occupy the harbor with adaptive “soft” infrastructures.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

Modern Poets: Rising Currents

The MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront addresses some of the most urgent challenges of sea-level rise resulting from global climate change in New York City. It features five inter-disciplinary teams that have proposed solutions to rising currents at five different sites along the New York and New Jersey coastlines. On a cruise aboard the New York Water Taxi around these sites, poets Matthea Harvey, Lisa Jarnot, and others read works about water, nature, and ecology, as well as newly commissioned poems that reimagine what the city might be like underwater, way above water, and with man-made islands and habitable piers. Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and organizer of the exhibition, introduces the program.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront

Rising Currents Boat Tour

The MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront addresses some of the most urgent challenges of sea-level rise in New York City resulting from global climate change. It features five inter-disciplinary teams that have proposed solutions to rising currents at five different sites along the New York and New Jersey coastlines. On a cruise aboard the New York Water Taxi around these sites, representatives from the architects-in-residence teams and Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and organizer of the exhibition, will give overviews of each site, explaining how the solutions on view in the exhibition present new ways to occupy the harbor with adaptive “soft” infrastructures. Barry Bergdoll also introduces the program.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

Rising Currents: A Panel Discussion on Next Steps

What is the afterlife of the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront? City planners, architects, and an engineer join us to discuss their reactions to the exhibition, possible next steps, and wider implications at the metropolitan, national, and the global levels. The discussion is moderated by Barry Bergdoll, curator of the exhibition, and includes panelists Amanda Burden, Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning; Guy Nordenson, Professor of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Princeton University, a Faculty Associate of the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and author of the study On the Water; Anuradha Mathur, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and a principle at Mathur/da Cunha; and Dilip da Cunha, visiting faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York, and a principle at Mathur/da Cunha.

Early this summer, I was asked by MoMA educator Laura Beiles to write a poem responding to the show Rising Currents for a Modern Poets reading that took place aboard the New York Water Taxi on June 29. When I first walked into the gallery space, I was struck by the measuring sticks painted on the walls, showing how much the water will rise in the next century.

Seeing a mark that indicates how high the water will be in, say, 2080 made the exhibition’s goals particularly vivid and intimate. This idea of measuring the water rising ended up being the backbone for my poem (titled with an image of a ruler underwater), in which a speaker talks to her lover about the water rising at a greatly accelerated rate and—along with other New Yorkers—tries to implement plans to slow the water rising, when it’s already much too late.

I used details from some of the plans in the poem—the retired subway cars, the artificial islands, and the sunken forest (my own bonsai version)—and invented a few others, the least practical of which is, perhaps, the lobster boats piled with biscuits. As a poet, I was very drawn to SCAPE ’s Oyster-Tecture, because linguistically it was so charming. I didn’t manage to get their invented word, “flupsy” (a dual-purpose oyster nursery and raft), into my poem, but I referenced their plan in the “oyster extravaganza”—one of the dioramas that gets washed away at the end of the poem, right before everyone drowns.

Unwedge the ruler you use to prop up your
window and meet me in the street. I’ll bring
the measuring tape curled in the desk drawer
like a sullen snail, and hand in hand, we’ll watch
as the water creeps up an inch, then two.
The river’s a baby, it’s a toddler, it’s grown.
The lecture series never made it past Puddles.
When the water is at our knees, will someone
please pick a plan? Plan A: A fleet of sunken
subway car reefs where fish with oil-clogged gills
can find some relief—hovering in the newly-calm water
as eels coil around silver poles still smeared with
commuters’ coughs and fingerprints. When the water
is at our waists, Plan B: Let loose the artificial islands,
one squirrel per. Also, the giant lilypads and the piles
of ash some of us have been saving for this occasion.
When the water is at our shoulders, the officials will
roll out the boulders and we’ll throw our bonsais in
the river to simulate that underground forest they said
might help—a miniature, misplaced effort, it’s true.
Our codicil to Plan C’s a bust. Years of scrupulous snipping
(my bristly little juniper, your tiny sugar maple) sink
with nary a bubble or clank of ceramic pot hitting rock.
Someone’s child goes bobbing by in a flotation device
made of empty milk jugs and waterwings. A dog, no two, go
under. Now, as the last bit of ice melts and the water laps at
the balconies, I can see in your eyes that it’s too late for Plans D
through Z, the oyster extravaganza, the lobster boats piled with
biscuits, all those dear dioramas with their rescue dramas
and baby-blue waves the size of a doll’s hand, that approach,
but never reach our once-dry land.

Comments

I work on the Climate Team at World Wildlife Fund US. This exhibit has great power in the way it informs people about impacts and adaptation strategy. It should be replicated for every coastal city in America. Washington, DC would be a logical next place. Perhaps the exhibit could be displayed in the new Capital Visitors Ctr. The Congress should see this.

The nexus of science and architecture is incredibly compelling.

Thanks for the innovation and creativity to address an important challenge we must confront.

This exhibition is both entertaining and informative. One is able to explore the modern art movement from it’s beginings in the early 20th century to the very contemporary art being produced in todays modern times.

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